First US Bank history

By August 1979, when Paul Volcker was sworn in as Fed chairman, drastic action was needed to break inflation’s stranglehold on the United States economy.

The Monetary Control Act of 1980 required the Fed to price its financial services competitively against private sector providers and to establish reserve requirements for all eligible financial institutions.

Over the next year, MNet was one of the few bright spots for MCorp, which reported a loss of $91 million for the first nine months of 1986.

Two months after Alan Greenspan took office as the Fed chairman, the stock market crashed on October 19, 1987.

In the spring of 1988, Lomas bought a portfolio of nearly 100,000 Visa and MasterCard accounts from Dollar Dry Dock Savings Bank, ranked 92nd among the nation's credit card companies.

Lomas Bank was the thirteenth largest credit card company by 1989.

By early 1990 the company had $1.5 billion in credit card receivables.

First USA continued to grow, and by the end of 1991 it had outstanding credit card loans of $2.2 billion from purchases and cash advances on three million accounts.

In early 1992, First USA began exploring the possibility of reducing its leverage through an initial public stock offering.

First USA more than doubled its net income to $39 million in 1993.

In July of 1994, the company announced that it had acquired two more independent processing outfits: the New York-based Electronic Processing Source Inc. and NationalCard Processing Systems Inc. of Englewood, New Jersey.

The effectiveness of the Federal Reserve as a central bank was put to the test on September 11, 2001 as the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania disrupted United States financial markets.

In 2003, the Federal Reserve changed its discount window operations so as to have rates at the window set above the prevailing Fed Funds rate and provide rationing of loans to banks through interest rates.